Category: Social Sciences

More surprisingly, Posner spends significant firepower assailing
“The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation.” This compendium (The Chicago Manual of Style for lawyers) might seem an unworthy target. Yet he is excoriating not just the Bluebook, but also the substitution of style over substance it represents. When created in 1926, supposedly by the great appellate judge Henry Friendly, the manual was 26 pages. A recent edition spans 511 pages. Posner appears to believe that following the Bluebook is about as bad as rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic — and by reverse order of manufacture, no less. He casts the Bluebook as a neurotic reaction to external complexity; if you cannot control what is important, you make important what you can control.

One of the advantages of having really smart colleagues — the kind who exhibit genuine intellectual curiosity, and who are truly interested in doing things well — is that you get to learn a lot from them.

I was recently having a conversation with my colleague and next-door office neighbor Joe Ritter in which we were discussing the possibility that the (binary) treatment variable in a paper I am working on might suffer from some misclassification. That is, my variable D = 1 if an individual has received the treatment and D = 0 otherwise, but it is possible that some people for whom D = 1 actually report D = 0, and that some people for whom D = 0 actually report D = 1.

When the possibility that my treatment variable might suffer from misclassification (or measurement error) arose, Joe recalled that he’d read a paper by Christopher R. Bollinger about this a while back. A few hours later, he sent me an email to which he’d attached the paper. Here is the abstract: Continue reading →

It’s that time of the year again, when graduate students who are about to enter their final year in economics and related disciplines are getting ready to go on the job market.

Going on the job market is a harrowing experience for most people, however, so I thought I should help job-market candidates by sharing my advice.

This post is the second in a series of three. Today, I’d like to discuss what it’s like to interview at the annual meetings, and how you should prepare for it. The next installment will be posted in late fall and will cover on-campus interviews. Continue reading →